Champion [Blu-ray]

Overview

In this boxing drama, Kirk Douglas stars as Midge Kelly, a poor, ambitious boy who accidentally learns that he is a "natural" boxer. He wins his early fights with ease and eventually becomes champion of the world. Then rot sets in and almost destroys his life and career.

Product Details

Release Date:	04/23/2013
UPC:	0887090060608
Original Release:	1949
Rating:	NR
Source:	Olive
Presentation:	[B&W]
Language:	English
Time:	1:39:00
Sales rank:	20,246

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Kirk Douglas	Midge Kelly
Marilyn Maxwell	Grace Diamond
Ruth Roman	Emma Bruce
Arthur Kennedy	Connie Kelly
Paul Stewart	Tommy Haley
Lola Albright	Mrs. Harris
Luis Van Rooten	Jerome Harris
John Day	Johnny Dunne
Harry Shannon	Lew Bryce
Ralph Sanford	Hammond
Esther Howard	Mrs. Kelly
Dimitri Tiomkin	Composer

Technical Credits

Carl Foreman

Mark Robson	Director
Carl Foreman	Screenwriter
Stanley Kramer	Producer

Editorial Reviews

Mark Robson's Champion was one of three boxing movies that caught the public's interest in the late '40s. Nastier in tone than Body and Soul (1947) or The Set-Up (1949), Champion is perhaps the harshest example of the genre, a descent into a moral abyss in which its hero -- Kirk Douglas at his brashest and most intense -- leads the charge and never looks back at what he's given up. In contrast to John Garfield's Charley Davis in Body and Soul, who sells his soul for success but redeems his honor in the end, and Robert Ryan's Stoker Thompson in The Set-Up, who is a victim plain and simple, Douglas' Midge Kelly is the architect of his own destruction. The movie raised some unpleasant truths about human nature, and Douglas was so compelling in a vile and irredeemable role that he almost single-handedly changed the rules for the roles that could be played by Hollywood leading men and in which the public would accept them. (Billy Wilder and Fred MacMurray had already made progress in this direction with Double Indemnity in 1944, but most leading men were still unwilling to take that kind of risk.) Had Douglas, pegged as one of Hollywood's comers, not taken the role near the outset of his career and run with it to an Oscar nomination and box-office success, we might never have seen financing for such movies as A Streetcar Named Desire, The Wild One, On the Waterfront, The Naked Jungle, The Harder They Fall, The Man With the Golden Arm, or other groundbreaking antihero vehicles of the 1950s, which were Hollywood's most daring films of a decade often regarded as bland. Ironically, Champion received more Oscar nominations than any other boxing film made up to that time (and until Raging Bull), in every major category except Best Director, which was telling about Robson's career -- he was a workmanlike director capable of occasional inspiration, but his best films featured the close involvement of a producer, Val Lewton early on and Stanley Kramer (who, with Douglas, reaped the lion's share of career benefits from this film) on Champion.